God Forgive Us

As a follower of Jesus, I am very comfortable with the idea that Jesus Himself expressed when He told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36) That statement was no effort to relinquish his role as King, for he would follow that with a word to Pilate that too few of His followers remember, “You say correctly that I AM a king.” (18:37)

In the world in which He lived, there were religious people who were Sadducees who thought going to bed with the government (Rome) was the shortcut to success and prosperity. And there were Pharisees who thought that some hyper-legalistic view of the Law was the only way to please God. Put those two fatally flawed ideas together and you have God’s Messiah dying on a cross.

Some things never change. Headline news on the front page of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for today – Saturday, 19 September 2015 – reads “Georgia ready to execute woman.”  Kelly Gissendaner – the woman Georgia is ready to execute – is not God’s Messiah. I get that and am not even remotely confused about that. But a boatload of people who claim to follow God’s Messiah are comfortable sitting by silently as the state executes her.

The short version of her story is that she arranged the death of her husband in 1997. Her partner in that crime worked through   a plea agreement, she went to trial. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. A host of complications – not unusual in death penalty cases – has brought us to this moment where, according to the AJC, a window of opportunity for the state to execute her has been opened for the state between noon September 29 and noon October 6. The state’s normal pattern is to execute such people on the first day of opportunity at 7:00 p.m.

Gissendaner is not shy in admitting that she arranged her husband’s death. But in prison, she has become a committed follower of Jesus and, according to news reports, become a very influential person among Georgia prisoners to actually take advantage of opportunities to reform their approaches to life. Any government official with a modicum of a brain would look at her story and think that perhaps the Georgia prison system would be more redemptive and more reform oriented if we allowed the Kelly Gissendaner kinds of people to continue living and being influential.

But that is exactly the outcome when followers of Jesus think that either going to bed with the government is the key to success or that being hyper-legalistic about “the Law” is the only option.  We crucify Jesus, execute Paul before he gets the chance to be the person God called him to be, and we support the state in its unjust decision to execute Kelly Gissendaner. We do that while patting ourselves on the back about our sense of holiness based upon “following the letter of the Law.”

Please.

A very respected and successful defense attorney in Georgia recently told me that the most difficult places in Georgia to address the issue of justice and redemption were places where evangelical Christians were the majority voters when it comes to electing judges and district attorneys. What sadder indictment of people who claim to follow Jesus could there be? Like the Sadducees of Jesus’ world, we think government trumps God; like the Pharisees, we think life is all about “the letter of the Law.” Put those two things together and we execute Kelly Gissendaner without even a flush of conscience.

For a number of years now the state government of Georgia has been elected by people who, by and large, would be in the category of “evangelical Christians.” The governor will sleep well because he doesn’t have the power to commute sentences. That is little more than the political claptrap that creates the challenges of our age. But he is elected by “evangelical Christians” who somehow have come to the conclusion that justice and redemption aren’t a part of the Jesus story.

God forgive us.

Georgia will likely execute Kelly Gissendaner. That will be a sad day. Her guilt is not a matter of dispute. Apparently the idea of redemption, renewal, and restoration is.

God forgive us.

Handbooks

n a little bit of friendly harassment with our director of human resources at Point University, I made  an edit suggestion for the employee policy handbook, followed with a parenthetical “and this coming from the guy who hates handbooks.”

She noticed that little friendly harassment and replied, “Don’t bad mouth handbooks – they make great doorstops.” Literally or figuratively, her statement is true. In the complicated, self-protecting world in which we live, we need doorstops.

One of the really interesting books I read this summer was Church Refugees, by Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope. Packard is a sociologist who has written a lot in the area of church decline and Hope is working on a doctorate in sociology and has done extensive research in the area of religion. The subtitle for the book, which gives a great clue as to what it is about, says “Sociologists reveal why people are DONE with church but not their faith.” 

One interesting comment from a formerly de-churched person who had come back to church in the form of a very small Protestant congregation gets to the heart of the doorstop issue in church: “At the last church I went to before this one, they just seemed to put up more and more walls and barriers. It got to the point that just to have a simple meal in the church with some friends or a Bible study, we had to go through three committees. It just wasn’t worth it anymore.” (pp. 54, 55)

In response to that comment and others like it, Church Refugees says “They weren’t frustrated by the existence of structure; they were frustrated when they felt the structure actively prevented them from doing the work they felt called to do.” And then, in explanation of why so many church are in decline, “They’re walking away because they’re convinced that the structures and bureaucracy of the church are inhibiting their ability to serve God.” 

Depending on where the doorstop is placed, it can do different things. It can, if placed in a certain position, prevent the door from opening. But if placed in a different location, it can keep the door from banging against the wall when the door is opened. In most cases, the doorstop is functioning well in the second of those options, not the first. Of course there are times you may not want the door open and the first example would be useful – but that’s the exception, not the rule.

Handbooks and bureaucracies are much the same. Especially in life and ministry in church. Of course there are times when the doorstop needs to keep the door shut, but most of the time you just want to make sure the wall isn’t getting banged up when the door opens. 

But according to Church Refugees, and confirmed by my own personal observations, it can be easy to let the doorstop shut the door to ministry, opportunity, service, and kingdom advancement. Or to use their language, doorstops can “inhibit our ability to serve God.”

Without handbooks, manuals, procedural policies, etc. most organizations, including churches, would end up in chaos. But the smart organizations – including churches – will always figure out where to put the doorstop! When that happens, the “DONES” will become fewer and fewer.

That’s a good thing!

Blessed Assurance!

Growing up during the time that I did, if you were a church-going person, you learned the words to lots of hymns – at least “the first, second and final stanza” words. One of those hymns for me was Blessed Assurance. The first stanza goes like this:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!

Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!

Heir of salvation, purchase of God,

Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.

Fanny Crosby composed those words – and growing up it seemed to me that she wrote more songs than the rest of the people in the hymnbook combined. There is a kind of comforting pull to hymn tunes and their words – especially when you grew up hearing them every Sunday.

“Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!” is one of my favorite phrases not only from Blessed Assurance, but lots of other hymns for that matter. It seems to suggest that somehow, some way, God provides for us these little moments of opportunities that even though we may still “see but a poor reflection as in a mirror,” that poor reflection reminds us of that day when “we shall see face to face.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Fast forward from my childhood days in a simple country church to the present, and when I hear “Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!” I think of N.T. Wright’s wonderful phrase suggesting that there are times when “heaven overlaps earth.” One of these days I would love to teach a theology elective exploring that phrase and its implications. After all, it is what Jesus Himself told us to pray for – “your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

This morning, at 8:30 sharp, Point University held its annual Convocation, marking the beginning of a new academic year. There isn’t an auditorium in the Greater Valley Area large enough for us to use, so we meet in the Sportsplex, a part of the Valley, Alabama Community Center. Last night our campus life ministers and others set up the gymnasium area with a stage and 850 chairs. We’ve never set up that many chairs for convocation before.

It wasn’t enough. From the stage where I was seated, there were clearly more people standing around the back and sides of the audience than there were empty chairs. I have to tell you it is an amazing thing to sit on the stage at a convocation for Point University and see this sea of humanity – mostly young students who have come to Point for an education at a school whose mission is “to educate students for Christ-centered service and leadership throughout the world.” 

And to get even more amazing, the audience was filled with people from a wide array of places in life. As President Collins said in his sermon, whoever wrote those words “red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight” must have been thinking about Point University. It was such a perfect image to reflect our spiritual formation theme for this year: Many parts . . . One Body. 

Some of my personal Bible reading over the past few weeks has included Revelation. I thought about some of that reading this morning as I looked out from the platform at convocation and saw the amazing gathering of God’s people in this community called Point University. Twice – once in Revelation 5:9 and again in 7:9 – John uses the phrase “every nation, tribe, people and tongue” to describe the “great multitude that no one could count” gathered before God. I know that vision is about the future – about the glorious reappearing of Jesus to complete God’s mission of renewing and restoring creation to its God-intended purpose.

But this morning, I couldn’t help but think “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!” And had Tom Wright been present, I believe he might have said, “This looks a bit like heaven overlapping earth.”